The Education Gadfly Weekly: How to ensure accountability in private school choice programs
The Education Gadfly Weekly: How to ensure accountability in private school choice programs
How to ensure accountability in private-school choice programs
Yes, choice itself is a form of accountability, but “customer satisfaction” isn’t enough when tax dollars are in play—even for private-school choice programs. The public has a right to know that participating students are gaining essential skills. To that end, this post discusses four tiers of escalating accountability and where state policy should land, depending on the amount of taxpayer dollars provided to individual schools, among other considerations.
How to ensure accountability in private-school choice programs
Advanced education provides benefits that differentiated instruction can’t
How teachers can build knowledge
Are the competitive effects of charter schools muted or magnified by private schools?
How some schools help students get back to grade level
#945: What happened when Tennessee colleges dropped remedial courses, with Jill Barshay
Cheers and Jeers: November 7, 2024
What we're reading this week: November 7, 2024
Advanced education provides benefits that differentiated instruction can’t
How teachers can build knowledge
Are the competitive effects of charter schools muted or magnified by private schools?
How some schools help students get back to grade level
#945: What happened when Tennessee colleges dropped remedial courses, with Jill Barshay
Cheers and Jeers: November 7, 2024
What we're reading this week: November 7, 2024
How to ensure accountability in private-school choice programs
States across the country have enacted new private-school choice programs in recent years, inevitably raising questions about accountability for participating institutions.
Though it is true—as our friends in the school choice movement argue—that choice itself is a form of accountability because of the agency it provides to parents and the power of the marketplace, we don’t think that “customer satisfaction” is enough. When tax dollars are in play, the public has a right to know that participating students are gaining essential skills. After all, we pitch in to pay for public education because everyone benefits when all children can access the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in life, ultimately ensuring the prosperity of the larger society and a healthy democracy. Education, particularly in the K–12 years, is both a private benefit and a public good.
Still, we recognize that getting accountability right requires a balancing act. If accountability provisions are too heavy-handed, private schools may choose not to participate—limiting choices for families. Or perhaps only those most desperate for students will sign up, driving down quality. Under pressure to raise test scores, private schools might also lose their distinctive character and shift toward uniformity with public schools, undermining the diversity of options that private-school choice seeks to provide.
On the other hand, we see no reason that private schools receiving significant financial support from the public, whether directly from the government or via student-driven mechanisms, should be exempt from transparency and accountability with respect to student learning and fiscal probity. That’s been good for charter schools and their students and will be good for those attending private schools, as well.
In this commentary, we describe the current state of play when it comes to accountability in private-school choice programs, including accountability for improving student outcomes. We discuss four tiers of escalating accountability, from minimal safeguards that protect against waste, fraud, and abuse, to comprehensive systems that mirror what we see in traditional public schools. At the end, we discuss where we think state policy should land—depending in part on the amount of taxpayer dollars provided to individual schools.
Note that this analysis is focused on accountability in the context of public support for private-school tuition scholarships. See here for our thoughts on the “accountability conundrum” when it comes to à la carte education services, such as those that parents may purchase through education savings accounts and that are delivered apart from full-time “schools.”
Tier I: Basic anti-fraud safeguards
Every state has some policies in place to prevent a blatant abuse of public funds and protect the safety and well-being of students. Most voucher and ESA programs, in particular, require that private schools meet health and safety codes and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin. They also mandate that institutions adhere to certain financial transparency requirements, whether proactive (i.e., schools must demonstrate fiscal viability before joining the program) or retrospective (i.e., schools must submit to regular audits).
These basic provisions help to ensure that students have a safe, stable, and fair place to learn—but they do not make any guarantees about educational quality.
Tier II: Information for parents
Many states also ensure that parents have access to information about participating private schools and how well they serve students. This approach goes beyond the measures in Tier I by facilitating active engagement with families and requiring more transparency from participating schools.
In some states, schools must regularly update parents on their children’s academic progress. (Of course, most private schools do this regardless of state requirements, via report cards if not test scores.) Per EdChoice’s School Choice In America Dashboard, North Carolina, for example, mandates that schools give parents a written explanation of their children’s performance every year. Other states, including Georgia and Utah, require that participating schools provide parents with teachers’ credentials—and, as part of Ohio’s Special Needs Scholarship Program, schools must share with parents a profile of their special-education program.
These policies are worthwhile because they compel schools to be forthcoming with families about whether their children are mastering important skills. But parental oversight alone can’t always prevent schools from wasting or abusing public money, and these requirements don’t offer information to prospective parents about the quality of participating schools. That’s why many states have decided that transparency for the public is also necessary, prompting them to implement measures outlined in Tier III.
Tier III: Information for the public
These policies require private schools to make key performance information available to the public.
For example, voucher program participants must take annual standardized tests in at least thirteen states. In states like North Carolina, the results are reported to the state Department of Education, where they are analyzed as part of a program evaluation. Meanwhile, in Ohio and Wisconsin, school-level test-score data are released to the public. Some locales (like Washington, D.C.) require private schools to use the state’s regular assessments, while others (like Ohio and Maryland) allow them to choose from among a set of nationally-normed assessments.
Importantly, in Tier III, the focus is on transparency, not accountability per se. That’s because Tier III policies don’t empower state officials to withdraw a private school’s ability to accept scholarship students based on their results. For that, we turn to Tier IV.
Tier IV: Consequential accountability
Some states take accountability even further. In Louisiana and Indiana, participating private schools are all but fully integrated into the state’s accountability system. Louisiana administers the same state assessments to them as it does to public schools and assigns them letter grades based on students’ performance. Schools that consistently receive low grades can face sanctions, including being barred from accepting new scholarship students. In Indiana, schools also receive letter grades, in this case based on test scores and graduation rates—and schools with a grade of D or F for two consecutive years may be disqualified from the program until they demonstrate significant improvement.
Another noteworthy model is found in Florida, where the non-profit organization Step Up for Students plays a behind-the-scenes role in monitoring school quality and nudging bad institutions out of the state’s program, somewhat akin to what authorizers do in the charter school sector. The authorizing approach can take hard data, especially test scores, and combine them with human judgment gleaned from school visits and the like to make informed decisions. Granted, there’s less transparency to the public around results with this line of attack.
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What can be made of all of this? Which is the “right” tier for private-school choice programs? Is more accountability always better?
Of course, opinions differ. In our view, Tier I and II policies alone are necessary but not sufficient. While they may protect against waste, fraud, and abuse—and provide helpful information for participating parents—they ignore the other half of the equation: the public. Taxpayers pour billions into private-school choice programs, and they have a right to know that this money is doing what it should: helping children learn.
Importantly, we have seen that Tier III and Tier IV policies can help private-school choice programs do just that. One study found that, when Milwaukee began requiring private schools to test their voucher students and publicly report the results, those students saw a significant achievement boost—even though the policy change included no sanctions for low-performing schools.
As for whether Tier III or Tier IV policies make sense for a given program, Fordham has long argued that the more public funding a participating private school receives, the greater the public accountability it should face—a “sliding scale,” so to speak. If a school only serves a handful of participating students, or if scholarship amounts are meager, schools should be allowed to use a nationally normed test and report results to the state Department of Education (and to parents), rather than to the public writ large. However, if a school’s entire student body (or close to it) receives public support via generously funded scholarships, participating private schools should be included in the state’s accountability system (or something quite similar), just like public charter or districts schools are, and eligibility should be withdrawn in the case of low performance.
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There are countless benefits to the growth of parental options in education and the increasing pluralism of our schools. At the same time, when school choice is deployed to advance a public purpose, and funded with public dollars, the impact on students should not be invisible to the public. That goes for all sectors—traditional public schools, charter schools, and, yes, private schools, too.
Advanced education provides benefits that differentiated instruction can’t
Editor’s note: This is an adapted excerpt from the author’s recent Fordham Institute report, “Think Again: Are Education Programs for High Achievers Inherently Inequitable?”
An overdue reckoning with racial injustice has led to countless changes and reconsiderations in American life. In the realm of education, those changes include a wave of district-led equity initiatives, many of which take a skeptical view of programs for high achievers, including “gifted” education, honors courses, and selective high schools. Such programs have historically tended to serve a disproportionately low number of Black, Hispanic, and Native American students when compared with district-wide demographics. In some places—from Boston and New York City to Chicago and San Francisco—advocates called for, and got, their elimination or complete overhaul.
One problem with these efforts is that ample research has long shown that well-designed, well-implemented advanced education works for students. Such forms of it as acceleration, flexible readiness groupings, and pre-differentiated, prescriptive curricula have significant positive effects, including for participating marginalized students.
Another problem is that the research doesn’t support the alternative to advanced education programs—which is grouping all same-age students in the same classrooms and asking teachers to differentiate their instruction (something commonly referred to as “differentiated instruction). In fact, no high-quality research shows that this sort of heterogeneous differentiation can work at scale for the full range of student readiness levels that are typically present in American classrooms. And several large-scale meta-analyses say it doesn’t work.
Yet such heterogeneous grouping pops up all the time as a silver-bullet solution to inequities. Indeed, this belief that they alone are sufficient for effectively educating everyone seems to explain leaders’ decisions to scrap (or consider scrapping) advanced programs. We see the belief in the power of heterogeneous grouping in major education outlets in headlines like “The Advantages of Heterogeneous Student Groups in Math” and in instructional frameworks like those of Stanford Professor Jo Boaler, whose views informed recent shifts in math policy in The Golden State.
To be sure, differentiation within heterogeneous classrooms is a normal part of effective schooling. As Holly Hertberg-Davis of the University of Virginia writes in a 2009 article: “Differentiation has been shown, even in small doses, to have an impact on student achievement and attitudes toward learning,” according to a 2005 study. And she adds that research suggests “Differentiation of instruction both within the regular classroom and within homogeneous settings is critical to addressing the needs of all high-ability learners, including twice-exceptional students, underachievers, students from underserved populations, and highly gifted students.”
Yet there’s a difference between using differentiated instruction in heterogeneous classrooms as part of a continuum of services designed to maximize the education of all students and using it as the main or only approach to educating all students, including high achievers. There are a few evidence-based reasons that underscore this distinction.
The first is the magnitude of achievement-level variance in the typical American classroom. A 2022 study, for example, “found that the typical American classroom includes students that span three to seven grade levels of achievement mastery. This translates to a fifth-grade classroom that includes students who have yet to master second-grade math content, as well as those who have already mastered eighth-grade math content.” A year earlier, another study used international test data from TIMSS and found that “the typical American fourth-grade classroom includes students achieving at all four international benchmarks in math…meaning that the entire possible range of student performance is present in the typical fourth-grade classroom.” Further research suggests that the pandemic only made this variance larger.
Providing effective instruction in a single classroom to students at so many different readiness levels is a very tall order for the great majority of teachers, regardless of training, experience, or resources.
Another problem with using differentiation in heterogeneous classrooms as the primary method of educating all students is that teachers just don’t seem to do it. Hertberg-Davis and Carol Tomlinson of the University of Virginia, for example, conducted a large study on the practice wherein teachers were aided by substantial professional development and coaching. Yet when they tried to measure the effect on student learning three years later, they “couldn’t answer the question,” Hertberg-Davis said, “because no one was actually differentiating.”
The reason for this oversight is likely that differentiation is difficult to do well at scale. National surveys in 2008 and 2010 both found that eight in ten teachers find the practice “very” or “somewhat” difficult. And in a 2010 Education Week article, education consultant Mike Schmoker wrote about his experience observing educators trying to differentiate instruction in their classrooms: “In every case, differentiated instruction seemed to complicate teachers’ work, requiring them to procure and assemble multiple sets of materials…and it dumbed down instruction.” When working with educators, Jonathan Plucker, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University who has studied advanced education for decades, regularly remarks that differentiation is the most advanced teaching skill and that most preparation programs don't train teachers to do it well. It also takes years of practice and requires substantial support.
As for the effects on advanced students in particular, in Hertberg-Davis’s aforementioned 2009 article, she concludes that “research indicates that teachers in heterogeneous classrooms tend not to include gifted students in the group of students they believe most need differentiation.” “When teachers do differentiate,” she adds, “they tend to focus their efforts on the more struggling learners in the classroom, believing that gifted students do not ‘need’ differentiation.” In other words, high achievers tend not to be a priority—which isn’t too surprising considering the push (and policy pressure) to boost low-achievers’ outcomes.
Worse, most states require very little in the way of training educators for the needs of high-achieving students.
The upshot is that heterogeneous classroom groupings and differentiation of instruction within them have a place in any continuum of services for students, including high achievers—but by itself, it does not and probably cannot meet the educational needs of advanced learners. It certainly does not have the proven academic benefits of interventions like acceleration and readiness groupings in separate classrooms. And research suggests it cannot be scaled well across our country’s large number of diverse educators, classrooms, and schools.
How teachers can build knowledge
Almost forty years ago, E.D. Hirsch published his seminal book, Cultural Literacy, which advanced a simple, albeit paradigm-shifting, premise: Intellectual aptitudes—including literacy itself—depend on knowledge more than skills. To comprehend and analyze a passage about the Battle of Gettysburg, a student would need to know much about key historical dates, American civic ideals, the realities of daily life and warfare in the antebellum south, figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, and, of course, the Civil War itself.
Though a best-seller at the time, Hirsch’s book received cold reviews from critics, accusing him of nationalism, reductionism, paternalism, canonism, arrogance, ethnocentrism, and worse. But in the ensuing decades, other authors such as Robert Pondiscio, Natalie Wexler, and Daniel Willingham have advanced similar arguments, and more and more research has vindicated his simple thesis: Knowledge matters enormously, and knowledge starts with facts.
That being said, the instructional and curricular implications of Hirsch’s claim aren’t self-evident. If knowledge matters more than academic skills, how should administrators and teachers alter the curriculum and instruction in schools to best serve students? We’ve confirmed the theory. Now what does it mean for practice?
Hirsch created the Core Knowledge Foundation, as he believed his insights pointed primarily to the challenge of getting curriculum right: Schools must sequence a knowledge-rich progression of learning both across and within grades. He’s correct about the centrality of curriculum, but there are also instructional practices that teachers can adopt to prioritize knowledge even if their school or district doesn’t adopt Core Knowledge or another knowledge-rich curriculum such as Wit and Wisdom.
In my experience, these practices come in five categories.
Teach and facilitate effective study techniques
Human learning occurs in an exchange between our working and long-term memories. The former is the locus of active thought; it’s the doorway to our long-term memory. But what we think about and consider in our working memory is not guaranteed to stick in our long-term memory and even what we do place there tends to fade over time.
Too often, students rely on methods of study—highlighting, rereading, cramming, summarizing, and repetitively practicing—that are ineffective at making learning stick. Advances in cognitive science have found that these practices and habits do little for the retention of knowledge in long-term memory. Instead, educators can teach students more effective methods for study and incorporate such methods into their own instruction.
For example, quizzing—and being quizzed—is a high-impact practice for the retention of information. When students first encounter a new concept, they may encode it in their long-term memory (if they’re paying attention and understand it), but that new knowledge quickly slips away. However, every time they are asked to recall that piece of information, it increases the likelihood that students will retain it in their long-term memory. Like another thumbtack into a flier on a bulletin board, each act of recall makes new learning more secure.
Teachers can encourage students to use this study habit: Make flash cards, encourage self or partner quizzing, inform parents about its benefits. But they can also work it into their instruction. Several times a week, my opening activities were quick, simple, low-stakes quizzes. Not every assessment has to include deeply analytical, long answer questions. Instead, I’d ask students to recall their vocabulary from this or previous units, remember main characters from previous units, or name historical events related to books that we’d read—ten quick fill-in-the-blank questions to begin the day.
There are other basic academic routines that teachers can incorporate into their lesson. For example, spaced practice, where students relearn or practice information after enough time has passed that they may have forgotten some, has been shown to improve the likelihood that students retain new information. Similarly, interleaved practice, where students practice problem sets of different types, is another high-impact, best practice. (For more ideas, I’d highly recommend the essay “Strengthening the student toolbox.”)
Build a student’s schema
Our present knowledge facilitates future learning. Just as more things adhere to a larger sheet of Velcro, a student who already knows a lot can capture a greater amount of new information. The more we know, the more we learn.
To demonstrate this, in a unique study, researchers first measured participants’ knowledge of baseball and various movies before teaching them facts about these topics. Unsurprisingly, on a follow-up exam, those who knew more about each topic remembered more of the facts that they learned about it. Like bigger Velcro, their knowledge about baseball and movies allowed them to capture more new knowledge.
In a second part of the experiment, the researchers tried to create this net of knowledge from scratch. They taught some participants about more obscure topics (professional beach volleyball and off-Broadway musicals) before providing all of the participants information on the topics. In follow up tests, those who had received prior instruction remembered more about this new information. Pre-instruction builds knowledge for participants to learn yet more.
Teachers can leverage the opening minutes of class to prime students to learn new knowledge. For example, when I taught Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, students knew some things about slavery, but they were by no means experts. So I’d open class with a few images and maps of a typical plantation, pre-readings on related topics, or important vocabulary to help them comprehend the chapter. Not only did they learn this information, but it primed them to glean and retain more from the chapters they’d read.
This can apply across content areas. Any imagery, diagrams, difficult vocabulary, or even pre-explanation before a full lesson or challenging reading will prime students to learn the day’s material more effectively.
Don’t forget memorization
My school opens many days with a poem recitation and every quarter the students in each grade must recite a poem at assembly before the entire school. It’s a delight to hear kindergarteners mispronounce their “r’s” in a Robert Louis Stevenson poem while the American flag flaps in the background, but there’s a strong knowledge-based argument for memorization, too.
Perhaps students may initially learn the words of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution or a Dickinson poem without profound understanding. Nonetheless, young children can delight in poetry—the rhythm, the symmetry, the sing-song nature—even before they fully understand the words. They get fleeting images that store in their memory even if some of the finer points elude them. They also store complex syntax and familiarize themselves with unique grammar constructions to employ in their own writing. Complex language becomes second nature.
It is common parlance in education to hear “I want to teach students how to think, not what to think.” But the how must begin with the what. Critical thought requires knowledge. For our students to think well, we must give them something to think about. Like a painter and their paints, our students need intellectual supplies to think with: beautiful imagery, profound arguments, pithy lines, and famous phrases.
Sometimes this provision of knowledge begins with something as simple as requiring students to memorize the definition of each part of speech. The memorization of facts or definitions is nowhere near sufficient for fully understanding abstract concepts or historical events, but it’s certainly an essential part of it.
Teachers might also consider using knowledge organizers. Largely unknown in the United States, they’re popular in the United Kingdom; they’re the bangers and mash of the British education world. Popularized at the highly successful Michaela School in London, knowledge organizers are essentially study guides that a teacher hands out at the beginning of a unit. They’re simple, ideally a single page, and list the key concepts, vocabulary, and knowledge that a teacher hopes students will memorize by the unit’s end.
A unit of The Magician’s Nephew, for example, may list key vocabulary such as narcissism, literary concepts like analogy, and external knowledge to learn such as “the Biblical creation story.” A knowledge organizer in science might include unit-specific vocabulary, essential diagrams of heat transfer, free body diagrams, water cycles, and essential formulas. A history organizer would include key dates of major events, significant figures, and important concepts. Teachers can use these for making flashcards, study tools, or the basis for analysis questions.
Read out loud
American education has no bylaws dictating that all reading in school must be done individually and silently. It’s a primary method through which everyone acquires new knowledge, but if passages are difficult, students may spend too much energy parsing complex syntax or advanced vocabulary to actually learn what’s in a particular passage or chapter.
Reading out loud to students allows them to access articles, stories, and knowledge that they might not otherwise be able to independently. In the higher grades, this could mean reading aloud complex passages from older works written in archaic language, such as America’s founding documents. How many of us have memories of sitting down to read our assigned Shakespeare at home only to face an impenetrable wall of early-modern English that our adolescent brains simply couldn’t decipher? This is a waste. Instead, teachers can and should read aloud from such texts with their mature fluency so students can more readily grasp the language and pause to explain important passages.
Nor should teachers confine themselves to fiction. For example, studies find that reading informational texts out loud in social studies improves both the content knowledge and the literacy of students. In fact, teachers pause to ask more questions and more complex questions when reading out loud from nonfiction texts than from fiction.
Keep questions simple
Everybody loves Bloom’s Taxonomy. Like salt at a restaurant table, it shows up in almost every discussion about education. But everybody also loves to misuse it, faulting basic comprehension as somehow less important—lower status—than analysis or synthesis. For example, in an article for the popular website Edutopia, the author implores his readers to encourage “higher order thinking,” lambasting standardized tests for requiring only “recall or comprehension.”
Yet in his 1956 Handbook that introduced the concept, Benjamin Bloom explained that he classified cognitive abilities in his taxonomy simply to help teachers “discuss these problems with greater precision,” not to rank or judge them. In fact, he refers to knowledge acquisition as the “primary” objective in education. Knowledge and comprehension are the basis of, not inferior to, far more complex thinking.
Too many teachers want to jump right to analysis or critique when teaching new concepts or reading articles, instead of asking simple, basic recall and comprehension questions. Research confirms that students who answer basic factual review questions after reading a text better retain information from that reading. Teachers should never stop with basic recall, but simple questions of comprehension must precede complex questions of analysis.
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Hirsch is correct in recommending that a knowledge-rich education is largely a curricular affair. When curricula are well planned and sequenced, schools can more effectively build in low-stakes quizzes throughout units, embed vocabulary terms into questions across units, guarantee that students encounter new eras and concepts in every grade, and include the most effective classroom activities. That being said, teachers who practice the suggestions above will help their students build knowledge even if their school or district hasn’t universally adopted such curricula and practices.
Are the competitive effects of charter schools muted or magnified by private schools?
One of the most interesting and significant findings about charter schools in the last decade—outside of the fact that they tend to outperform traditional public schools (TPS)—is that growing charter enrollment is tied to significant increases, on average, in the achievement of poor, Black, and Hispanic students across entire metro areas (particularly larger ones). In other words, a rising tide of charters lifts all boats, regardless of whether disadvantaged students are enrolled in charter or traditional schools.
A recent working paper from David Figlio and colleagues adds some additional nuance and methodological innovation to these findings. The new wrinkles utilize sibling groups and access to birth data to enable better controls and attempt to assess whether concurrent competition from private schools mutes or magnifies competition from charters.
The researchers examine how an increase in access to charter schools in twelve districts in Florida affects a number of outcomes for students remaining in traditional public schools. Charters in these dozen districts serve about 13 percent of the students in their jurisdictions, while the entire Florida charter sector serves almost 12 percent of students in the state, thus raising the likelihood that results are applicable to the Sunshine State as a whole. The analysis merges student-level administrative data for students in the dozen districts from the 2000–01 through 2016–17 school years with birth record data (including parental education and income) for all Florida students who were born in the state between 1992 and 2002.
Figlio and team measure competition primarily through a charter-density approach, which captures the number of charters within a five-mile radius of a given TPS. The study uses three different analytical methods.
The first model uses each student as their own comparison group. That is, a student’s relative performance in a year where their charter school faces little competition is compared to their own performance in a year where their charter faces more competition (due to charter closings or openings).
The second model takes particular care to control for student sorting. For each student, it makes comparisons to a single average competition measure based on the predicted level of charter competition that the student will be exposed to (without going into great detail, that prediction is loosely based on students born in a given ZIP code in a given academic cohort).
The last method has siblings serving as comparisons for one other. Specifically, it compares the outcomes of two or more siblings, each attending a given grade level in the same TPS in different years. Analysts determine whether the outcomes of a sibling who attends a given grade in a given school are systematically better (or worse) when the school experiences more charter competition, compared to the sibling who attended the same grade in the same school under conditions of lesser charter competition. The siblings analysis is their preferred method because it controls for unobserved family characteristics, such as parental expectations or the ability to competently help with homework and helps to eliminate typical criticisms, including the possibility that new charters take only low-performing students and leave high performers at the district schools.
In looking across all three models, the researchers find that competition stemming from the opening of new charter schools improves reading but not math performance, and that it also decreases absenteeism among students who remain in the TPS. The siblings analysis is the more conservative set of results and finds that an increase of ten charter schools within five miles would be associated with a 0.035 standard deviation (SD) increase in reading scores. Since an expansion of ten charter schools is not a likely scenario in real life, they recalculate their results in terms of a single-school increase. For math, results are not significant. For reading, they find a statistically significant effect size of 0.35 SD and statistically significant reductions in absenteeism of 0.74 percent of the sample mean. Although those reading impacts seem modest, analysts say that they nonetheless compare to the effects of the voucher program in Florida (based on an earlier study). Subgroup analysis shows that absenteeism results are null for Black students, but that charter competition is associated with reductions in absences for White and Hispanic students. Test score results by subgroup depend largely on the model, at least one of which shows statistically significant negative effects for White students.
Finally, the researchers look at whether competitive effects of charter schools are influenced by private schools. For math, results are statistically insignificant regardless of the level of private school saturation (or the selection of model). For reading, they find positive results between charter competition and achievement that are driven by the schools facing more private school competition (but only in the siblings analysis). By contrast, for absences, they find that charter effects are bigger when there is less private school competition in the local area, but here results differ based on the approach, so analysts advise caution.
These findings largely reinforce those from previous studies on charter competitive effects and make them even more compelling, given the stronger controls inherent in the siblings analysis. What’s more, adding more private school competition in places with lots of charter competition doesn’t harm student outcomes. Still, we need replication studies in other states, since the market share of charters in the Sunshine State is not comparable to most others due to its large size and relative diversity.
SOURCE: David Figlio, Cassandra Hart, and Krzysztof Karbownik, “Competitive Effects of Charter Schools,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (February 2024).
How some schools help students get back to grade level
According to estimates by principals nationwide, about 44 percent of American public-school students were behind grade level in a least one subject at the start of the 2023–24 school year. Despite myriad efforts to address the issue, many schools are still struggling to help their students catch up. However, as a new TNTP report highlights, performing below grade level need not always mean that students will remain behind grade level for the rest of their years in school. The report closely examines a small sample of schools where students are making rapid academic progress and reveals that certain practices are common across these “trajectory-changing” schools.
The report combined data from several sources to develop a better understanding of what goes on at these schools. The authors first looked at Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready data from 2017 to 2021, which confirmed that the majority of students who fall behind academically stay behind throughout their academic career. They then used the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), which combines state assessment data with National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data spanning the 2008–09 to 2018–19 school years, to identify trajectory-changing schools that have defied this trend, cross-checking these schools with more recent EDFacts data to confirm that their growth patterns withstood the pandemic. Schools were considered trajectory-changing if the average student was not yet on grade level in their initial tested grade and grew by at least 1.3 relative grade levels per year.
This process led to a list of about 1,300 schools, which comprised the top 5 percent of all schools in SEDA. The authors then chose seven for in-depth examination, selecting those whose demographic makeup broadly reflected that of trajectory-changing schools in general, and that represented a wide range of contexts in terms of both urbanicity and school type (e.g., traditional public, charter, etc.). From these seven schools, they collected a combination of quantitative and qualitative data, including academic classroom observations; teacher, student, and caregiver surveys; naturalistic classroom observations; student focus group responses; and caregiver interviews. They analyzed these data in combination to produce insights into how teachers and leaders in these trajectory-changing schools accelerate student learning and affect students’ and caregivers' experiences.
The report found three main commonalities in the sample schools’ practices: belonging, consistency, and coherence. Trajectory-changing schools cultivate belonging and design support structures for students to create a healthy emotional climate for learning. They also deliver consistently good teaching and grade-level content for their students in every classroom, with little variation in quality and a common understanding among teachers of what good instruction looks like. Finally, these schools develop coherent instructional programs—including curricula, materials, interventions, and assessments—that work together to advance the same goals.
While these findings are based on a wide range of data collected from teachers, students, and caregivers, much of the data consisted of self-reports, which are often considered less reliable than other, more objective data sources. It is also important to note that only seven schools were deeply examined for this report, and these seven targets were not randomly chosen, which means that the results are not widely generalizable. Furthermore, the study failed to include a comparison group, which makes it difficult to know for sure whether the practices highlighted in the report are truly what’s spurring student progress at these schools.
Nevertheless, the authors provide four strong recommendations, each with action items at the state, school system, school, and community levels. The first is to create a supportive ecosystem within schools. For policymakers, this means incentivizing the implementation of trajectory-changing practices, while school leaders and educators work to build stronger relationships and holistic knowledge of each student. The second is to look beyond the nine-month school year and begin centering decisions in the experiences of the “whole person” who will be in school through the age of eighteen. The third is to choose a narrow entry point by investing in just one focus area first, and then building on it bit by bit. And the final recommendation is to create ongoing, long-term processes of improvement that lead to sustained change.
Individually, these recommendations highlight effective approaches that policymakers and school leaders can take to help students catch up to grade level. But together, they capture a broader point about school improvement that many reformers have been making for years: the schools where students grow the most often approach change not through the introduction of specific initiatives or programs, but rather as a large-scale, systemic process that involves building strong schoolwide habits and reframing mindsets towards students and their academic progress.
Helping students to catch up when they begin behind grade level often feels like an impossible task, but the TNTP report demonstrates that this kind of change is possible. 1,300 schools across the country have found a way to do it, and others can, too.
SOURCE: “The Opportunity Makers: How a Diverse Group of Public Schools Helps Students Catch Up—and How Far More Can,” TNTP (September 25, 2024).
#945: What happened when Tennessee colleges dropped remedial courses, with Jill Barshay
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jill Barshay, author of The Hechinger Report’s “Proof Points” column, joins Mike and David to discuss her recent article on the surprising effects of colleges eliminating remedial courses. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber shares a study examining the impact of Washington’s academic acceleration policies on high school students.
Recommended content:
- Jill Barshay, “A decade of data in one state shows an unexpected result when colleges drop remedial courses,” The Hechinger Report (September 23, 2024).
- Michael J. Petrilli, “‘Kid, I’m sorry, but you’re just not college material’ Is exactly what we should be telling a lot of high school students,” Slate (March 18, 2014).
- Chester E. Finn, Jr., “What's the point of high school?” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (September 5, 2024).
- Megan Austin, Ben Backes, Dan Goldhaber, Dory Li, and Francie Streich, Leveling Up: An Academic Acceleration Policy to Increase Equity in Advanced High School Course Taking, American Educational Research Journal (2024).
Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Stephanie Distler at [email protected].
Cheers and Jeers: November 7, 2024
Cheers
- A Missouri elementary school renamed its building in honor of its beloved custodian to celebrate her retirement after thirty-two years of service. —CNN
- New York City’s new superintendent attended Catholic schools as a teenager. —Chalkbeat
Jeers
- Massachusetts’s graduation exam loses in referendum. This will cause high school diplomas to lose value—and result in colleges and hiring managers having less confidence in graduates. —Jessica Grose, New York Times
- Since his election, Mayor Brandon Johnson has been in lockstep with the Chicago Teachers Union, leading to financial and political turmoil in the city. —New York Times
- More than 200 Houston teachers paid to have someone else take the state certification exam for them—and now they are scattered in classrooms across Texas. —CNN
- Beginning in 2027, New York high schoolers will no longer need to pass Regents exams in math, English, and science in order to graduate.—Chalkbeat New York
What we're reading this week: November 7, 2024
- New research shows that an endorsement from a local teachers’ union can boost a school board candidate’s likelihood of winning by up to 20 percentage points, due in large part to the popular belief that teacher approval signals competence in improving schools. —The 74
- This election’s focus on the “working-class” voter oversimplifies the American electorate by falsely equating three definitions of “working-class” that actually characterize distinct groups: the lack of a four-year college degree, “blue collar” jobs, and union membership. —Michael Hartney and Vladimir Kogan, The Hill
- With colleges under pressure to increase graduation rates and professors under pressure to earn positive student evaluations, grade inflation is becoming more common in higher education, making some employers hesitant about hiring recent college graduates. —Karin Klein, Los Angeles Times